A Particular Procrastination

I am SUCH a procrastinator.

This is not a surprise to anyone who knows me well. I get a big rush from plowing all my energy into things at the last minute. It's intoxicating. I think I'm probably an amateur adrenalin junkie. You won't find me on thrill rides at amusement parks, or jumping out of airplanes. I'm not into extreme sports. But I do like a low-key, constant buzz of--what is it? Energy? The Life Force? Microscopic buzz saws in my blood? Yes, maybe that.

I toyed with the idea of having a NaNoWriMo-type November. Lots of words written! No editing! Pure, creative force flowing through me! God, I love that notion. Just letting myself float free, tossing sentences out like so many shiny Mardi Gras necklaces to land prettily on the page. Unfortunately, I suck at letting myself go that way. I am the least free-form writer on the planet. I edit sentences three and four times before they even make it to my fingertips, let alone onto the page. I was always a color-inside-the-lines kid. And don't get me started about making outlines. I waited way too long to start doing that before November first. I've never worked from an outline that was anything more than a couple of lines on what might happen in the next chapter or two. I keep threatening to outline books, but when I do, I realize that I've lived the whole story in a day, and I get bored. Nexxxxxxt!

Oh, I still need to get the words done in November. Not 50K. 15 to 20K is more like what I need. It's doable, if I buckle down. But I still have that whole procrastination thing to deal with. And there's not just writing to procrastinate about. There's Thanksgiving for 14. Prepping for reading at a Kaskaskia College next week. Keeping track of Weight Watchers points so I won't end up as a float in the local Christmas parade. Care and feeding of the Benedict Corporate Staff--including the critters. Blah. Blah. Blah. Procrastination opportunities abound.

In the spirit of getting things done in a NaNovember kind of way, I've decided that I'm going to upgrade the quality of my procrastination. You'll most often find me procrastinating with my iPad. Sometimes I'm stalking making friends on Twitter. Sometimes I'm looking at shoes on Zappos. Or checking sales numbers at BN or Amazon. Playing Candy Candy Match obsessively. Or watching crime shows on Netflix. Which isn't like procrastinating by watching mindless television at all. I swear. It's directed viewing. I watch entire seasons of programs like Midsomer Murders, the Swedish Wallander, Black Books, Ghost Hunters or Bones. Since most of these programs are about crime and the supernatural, I could even call it research. Right?

No, I've decided that I'm going to procrastinate with books this month. Paper books. Legacy books. Books I have on my dusty bookshelf.

Books are how I got into this whole writing game, anyway. In addition to my pleasure reading, I read several books a month for review during the year I was writing my first published novel. One of the reasons Isabella Moon crosses so many genres is that I was busy reading so many genres at once--they all ran together in a good way in my head.

You would be appalled to know how little some writers read. I know many writers (they shall remain nameless) who profess that they don't have time to read any books at all. Let me repeat: They don't read books--the things that they create. It's like being a gourmet chef who refuses to eat--or only eats food to keep herself/himself alive, but not well-fed. That seems insane to me. Yet, it's all too plausible.

Reading a novel is akin to slow-cooking five or six dinners for the family. It takes time. (I've never understood why anyone would speed-read a novel they weren't being paid to read.) It's a huge investment if you'r reading for entertainment. Right now I'm reading Jo Nesbo's The Leopard at various points during the day, and watching Wallander while I ride the Schwinn Aerodyne in the morning. Talk about shifting mental gears. It's surreal. I keep finding myself impatient with the novel. "Wallander would have this solved in 90 minutes!" I can't help but think. I want to page ahead. But I don't. What would be the point? If I did, I would have the answers and only the answers to plot questions. I would miss the nuances. I would miss the human-like inconsistencies that define excellent characters. I would miss the chance to learn something useful to me.

Books engage us on so many levels. They exercise our thoughts. They carve out grooves in our passivity-smoothed brains. And for writers, they are sustenance. Proof that someone has gone before us, proof that there is somewhere for us to aim, too--even if the target is well beyond the book we're reading at that moment.

I don't have a reading list made up for November. For the past three years I've been reading a significant number of crime and mystery novels. I know their rhythms and pathways and tropes all too well. They have become my comfort food. I think I'll pick some non-fiction, next, to see if I can't carve out a new pathway or two for myself. You know. While I'm supposed to be doing something else.

Writer Girl-Crush: Louise Penny and Her Marvelous Canadian Mysteries

(Pics are all from Louise Penny's website.)

If you know my writing, it might surprise you that I go in for--devour, even-- picturesque mysteries. When people visit our house for the first time, they seem disappointed not to find pitchforks and pole arms on the walls, Bowie knives on the kitchen island, or a guillotine in the dining room. While it's true that I require annual doses of vintage Cormac McCarthy, Jim Thompson, and Charlie Huston, a girl can't live on brute-force fiction alone, no matter how beautifully written it is.

I have a deep and abiding fondness for Brit-style, investigative mysteries. From Lynley to Prime Suspect to Inspector Morse to Jack Frost to Dalgliesh to Poirot--I love them all. (I wish I could say that I enjoy all of Agatha Christie's work, but I find that she often holds back some bit of information so that the mystery can't really be solved by the reader. That bugs me.) It's not so much that the stories are formulaic; it's that they are usually comfortably paced and have a very strong sense of setting or place.  And because they're generally set in a series, one can form strong attachments to individual characters.

Opening a novel by a writer one has never read before is a little like going on a first date. As a reviewer, I learned to be the aggressor. A book had to prove to me that it was worth my time in the first twenty-five pages, or I would spend the next few hours looking at my watch. Now that I'm no longer reviewing, I have the time to be more patient, but I still hope that I'll be seduced--and quickly.

After I began to read Louise Penny's fourth novel, A Rule Against Murder, I couldn't stop. I read it in a weekend, submerging myself in the world of Penny's series character, Canadian Chief Inspector Armand Gamache, who, even while on a brief anniversary trip with his wife, Reine-Marie, can't escape murder. Murder blots his scenery, whether it's an arm's length away, or in a charming, distant village. In the case of A Rule Against Murder, the crime happens at the inn where he and his wife are celebrating their anniversary. The case becomes a sort of country-house murder, with all of the suspects at hand. It's an intimate story.

Penny does intimacy awfully well. Her novels--at least the later ones that I've read--are written in a close third person that floats effortlessly from one character to another. There are no awkward white spaces. One person is observed, then becomes the observer. The tone doesn't change, just the characters' points of view. We know their likes and prejudices as well as their self-deceptions. This is particularly true of Gamache. He's fair-minded, intelligent, and professionally demanding. Also thoughtful and compassionate--something his colleagues don't understand and often mistake for weakness. A native of Quebec, he's acutely aware of Canadian politics, and the centuries-old struggle between the English and the French in Canada. (Penny explores that conflict in detail in her latest, Bury Your Dead.) He's always the steady center of everyone's world. Most of all, Gamache is kind. He works at being kind, and he encourages genuine kindness in the people around him. But he's kind without sentimentality. It's a kindness that feels real, the type of kindness that I wish I could embrace every day.

With A Rule Against Murder, Penny was well into the Gamache series, and I was far behind. But I didn't feel like I'd missed critical information from the three earlier novels. That can be a problem with a series and series' characters; it can be confusing to jump right into the middle of five or six books. But, like P.D. James, Penny is graceful about filling in the necessary blanks without dragging down the current story.

So,  I read Penny's three most recent novels in order: A Rule Against Murder, The Brutal Telling, and Bury Your Dead. Now I'm reading Still Life, the first novel in the series of six. Still Life is also the introduction to Three Pines, the once-Loyalist village (invented) where most of the series occurs. Three Pines is within easy driving distance of Quebec, and has a business district consisting of a bookstore, a tiny grocery, and a bistro. Most of the houses are arranged on the other three sides of the village green, and there's a massive Victorian house looming from the hillside that may or may not be haunted. (Sounds remarkably similar to Miss Marple's St. Mary Meade. I like that.) The fact that the village is so small gives Penny's characters the freedom to be expansive. Life moves slowly, even when there's a murder. The characters are an ensemble cast, and Penny focuses tightly on different ones with each novel.

I could go on to describe the books' plots more fully, but it will be much more enjoyable for you to discover them yourself.

It's really Penny's skilled writing that I'm crazy for. Her pacing moves the story forward without unnecessary detours/digressions (okay, the bow-hunting disquisitions early in Still Life made me a little grumpy). I'm never left wondering, "how did we get here?" There are many moments of dark, nerve-wracking suspense. I'm thinking particularly of Bury Your Dead, whose last thirty or so pages had my heart doing that pounding thing--And then I cried a little.

Early in every writer's career, some sensible teacher will say (one hopes), "Don't give us too much description. Leave much to the reader's imagination." I think this is one area in which I hope to emulate Penny. Her descriptions are complete, yet rarely overdone or superfluous. She states what the characters look like, plainly and with straightforward prose. She notes the odd little objects that make up a life, or death. Clothes, hairstyles, scent. As a reader, it's helpful to know those things. As a writer, it's hard to judge when enough is enough.

I do go on, don't I? I warned you that I had a pretty serious writer girl-crush!

My last and favorite thing:

Have you ever felt like you were able to take away something important from a work of fiction? Here's the lesson that Gamache's mentor gave him when he was a young policeman. He was to remember to always say these things when they needed to be said. I memorized them, then wrote them down. I wonder if Penny came up with the list herself, or if they are a variation on something someone shared with her.

1. I'm sorry.
2. I was wrong.
3. I need help.
4. I don't know.

Simple, aren't they? Gamache uses the phrases like seasoning, throughout his work and daily life. They always move things forward, and keep his ego in check.

Moving forward with humility. That's a good thing, yes?

Read these books. Enjoy!

Reading: Lord of the Flies

In high school I was never assigned the novels CATCH-22, CATCHER IN THE RYE, TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, or LORD OF THE FLIES. So I never read them. I remember reading some Dostoevsky, THE GREAT GATSBY, a lot of Shakespeare,  and THE WORLD ACCORDING TO GARP. The program I was in was advanced--and it was the seventies. Academia was making stuff up as it went along.

Maybe the curriculum writers thought that the above-mentioned books were too commercial? Too un-literary? How odd. They were certainly good enough for the regular students. At the time I remember feeling a little superior for not being required to read those books. Funny. Now the whole distinction seems absurd. There's no reason the other classes shouldn't have been reading more Shakespeare than Romeo and Juliet. And now that I've read LORD OF THE FLIES, I feel like I was robbed.

Allegory--as in (forgive me for this, fellow Christians) PILGRIM'S PROGRESS--can be dull stuff. I like my allegory unrecognizable and entertaining. That's the only way it works. Lord save us all from stick-thumping morality tales. Yes, they're fine for the youngest children. Take THE POKY LITTLE PUPPY, in which the puppy who spends all his time messing around and not paying attention to the puppy schedule doesn't get dessert. (Sadly, it didn't make much of an impression on me as a child.) Now there's a good and useful story. LORD OF THE FLIES is certainly allegory. William Golding said as much. Were the curriculum writers thinking that the regular kids were better suited to or only prepared to understand easily-identifiable allegory?

Isn't all fiction, at some level, allegory for the way we are?

From the first paragraph, I was immediately immersed in LORD OF THE FLIES. Because I'd never read it, or the Cliffs Notes version (which is what many of my friends read), I wasn't thinking about the Garden of Eden as Golding wrote of the delights of the island. I wasn't thinking of Jack's red hair and his unpleasant visage as representative of human weakness and potential evil. I certainly wasn't thinking of Simon as Jesus. I was just sucked into the story, feeling just the way I did the first time I read JANE EYRE and TREASURE ISLAND--as though there was no other story in the world in that moment. Nothing else mattered.

As a writer I'm drawn to the simplicity of Golding's prose. But also as a writer I notice that he spends waaaaaaay too much time on the way Ralph pushes his hair out of his eyes, the color of palm tree shadows, and how grubby the boys are. As a reader...Oh! The the way the wind and the parachute animate the body/beast caught on the mountainside... It's a vision of  horror that touches me in a visceral place. When I heard it--I listened to the audio version narrated by Golding--I experienced a kind of deep, childish pleasure that is so rare and precious that I wouldn't even want to experience it more than a few times in my life, lest it be cheapened.

Perhaps I wasn't meant to read this novel until now. Perhaps I wouldn't have experienced that same pleasure back when I was fourteen. By the time I was fourteen, I was almost too distracted to be deeply affected by literature--I can only compare it to the way teenagers are often turned off by church and talk of God. They must leave it and be at their most skeptical for a while in order to look at it with mature, more discerning eyes when they're adults.

Goldman does a wonderful intro to the audio, talking about the origins of the novel and why he wrote about boys instead of girls. And here's a link to a Times U.K. online piece about the most recent Goldman biography. It's definitely worth a look if you like to know how a book comes about.

If you haven't read LORD OF THE FLIES, I hope I haven't spoiled it for you. If you have read it, you should definitely read it again.